Darren Gene Peterson, Hsin-Cheng Lin, Shiyi Li

Tinker.it – a new platform for self-tracking “experimenters”

IIT Institute of Design

Tinker.it – a new platform for self-tracking “experimenters”

While the self-tracking devices now are remarkably similar, the goals of the people using them are not.

Based on the research, we created a service for a segment of self-trackers who use their devices in a very different way. “Experimenters” hack their devices and data to satisfy their unique needs.

Tinker.it is a platform where self-trackers can create, iterate, and share those experiments. Unlike most self-tracking services, Tinker.it sustains a community of experimenters who build their own unique designs. Tinker.it provides online tools for making those designs, and facilitates sharing of them within the community.

JURY COMMENTS

This is a great way to help create more citizen-scientists. As we get ever more (and more diverse) wearable technologies and can create a quantified self, this platform allows individuals rather than companies move beyond the mere technology to make the underlying issues (such as how we should live to be healthier) both deeper and more shared. Nice work from student teams at IIT’s Institute of Design.

Tinker.it – a new platform for self-tracking “experimenters”

1. The Nutshell: In plain language, tell us what your project is, what it does, and what it’s comprised of.

While the self-tracking devices now are remarkably similar, the goals of the people using them are not.

Based on the research, we created a service for a segment of self-trackers who use their devices in a very different way. “Experimenters” hack their devices and data to satisfy their unique needs.

Tinker.it is a platform where self-trackers can create, iterate, and share those experiments. Unlike most self-tracking services, Tinker.it sustains a community of experimenters who build their own unique designs. Tinker.it provides online tools for making those designs, and facilitates sharing of them within the community.

2. The Brief: Summarize the problem you set out to solve. What was the context for the project, and what was the challenge posed to you?

Four ways into self-tracking
Primary research identified four gateways into self-tracking, or what some call the Quantified Self, that reflect different mindsets: target-focused people track to hit a number, such as steps walked; performance trackers aim to increase overall performance in a category; “life mission” trackers seek to build a holistic view of their life.

The “Experimenters”
One group however, differs significantly from the above groups. Instead of focusing on improvements of their well being, “experimenters” accumulate data for experiments that lead to interesting insights or unusual correlations. The experimenters have different viewpoint on tracking themselves, they self-track to fulfill their curiosity.

Build to understand, build to communicate
Experimenters usually start with a question that is unsolved or ambiguous. They build a hypothesis, and test it with improvised gadgets or apps, iterating until an answer emerges. Once the question is solved they move on to the next. During the process of experimenting, the experimenters constantly exchange information with others. They gather knowledge and techniques, receive suggestions and feedback, share new findings, and improve each other’s work.

Bridging the gap
Experimenters have diverse intentions and goals. They need a place to connect with like-minded people and to advance their unique ideas. Our challenge is to not just to serve this group, but to organize and aggregate their creativity and expertise as "citizen scientists" for use by others. Experimenters have the potential to be creative contributors to researchers, scientists and industry.

3. The Intent: What point of view did you bring to the project, and were there additional criteria that you added to the brief?

Explore the future of sensor-driven data
The aim of this project is to focus on next generation designs for new sensor-driven consumer technologies: What value might they provide to the users, where could they be applied, how can we better leverage their potential, and where is sensor-driven self-knowledge likely to go? The future of ubiquitous sensors will deliver huge possibilities across industries. Our fundamental goal was to try to illustrate the trend with new offerings.

Build fast and iterate often
Based on the understanding of the fast changing nature of the newly-emerged self-tracking group, we adopted the idea of “agile development” into our project. Rather than waiting for research to conclude before designing and deploying concepts, we engaged in an iterative process of prototyping and refining with each new discovery

Focus on differences within user group
Experimenters are a diverse group, united more by their inclination to pose questions and test hypotheses than by any shared interest. To address this diversity and to provide a cohesive experience to them as a group, we took a further step to define different "modes" of experimenters, so that we could create tailored solutions for all of them.

We started with research from a previous project that concluded that self-trackers can be segmented into four groups, and a challenge: design for the needs of experimenters. From this beginning we conducted our own exploration, ideation, and refinement to come to our current solution.

Precursors
First we summarized the key characteristics and needs of this group. When we compared those needs with current tracking products in the market we found that there are no products serving this group. One analogous product is Tictrac, a quantified self data aggregator, but this service does not meet the building and customization needs of the experimenters.

In other fields there are some precursors we could found, such as IFTTT (If This Then That), a simple online automation tool, and Github, an online community for co-creating and sharing software. Tinker.it is differentiated from these by the focusing on quantified self tracking, devices, and data.

Primary Research
Guided by our general characteristic outline, we found and interviewed four different people that we identified as experimenters. Each interview highlighted different aspects of the experimenter mentality.

We observed a local event, the Quantified Self Meetup, where people come together to give presentations about the novel designs they have made while tinkering with their own devices and data. We were inspired by how the group interacts, sharing and building on each others' learning, and giving presentations.

Insight
We found that while the experimenters have shared general characteristics they also demonstrate a variety of needs and mental models within their group. Our insight is that there are three ways experimenters experiment: some build their own work, while others search out the work for their own use, and still others branch out from existing work.

Prototype and test
We developed wireframes to provoke our participants during the interviews. This validated our hypothesis that experimenters need a flexible building tool. The probes also provided us new insights about experimenters' desires to learn from and build on other same-minded people.

Finalize concept
After testing, we revised and finalized our concept. With the second iteration of the interface. We refined the search method, the interaction of building and branching, and added the journaling features.

5. The Value: How does your project earn its keep in the world? What is its value? What is its impact? (Social, educational, economic, paradigm-shifting, sustainable, environmental, cultural, gladdening, etc.)

The challenges
Today, we have the ability to collect so much data on ourselves. With this data we might be able to discover new things about ourselves and to do something with our discoveries. But this explosion of opportunity has difficulties of its own. How do we manage all of these sensors and data? What will we track? And what should we do with anything we find?

Satisfying the needs of the experimenters
By providing a flexible, easy to use environment we better serve experimenters during their process of building, and iterating on experiments. We close the loop by enabling better sharing mechanisms for the experimenters to feed back their findings and improvements to the community. In the process, Tinker.it nurtures continuous incremental improvements on innovative ideas: solutions by the crowd, for the crowd.

Why it’s important to serve the experimenters
As Tinker.it helps the self-trackers fulfill their curiosity, what they develop and build will serve society. Their work acts as a precursor to the future of the self-tracking device and service industry, and informs other groups beyond the self-tracking community, such as healthcare and scientific research. What experimenters build now will be used by everyone in the future.

6. Did the context of your project change throughout its development? If so, how did your understanding of the project change?

A multiform group
The initial ideation of the project was based on an understanding of experimenters as a unified whole. However, further research revealed that there is no universal approach to tackle the needs and characteristics of the experimenters. Several distinctive patterns emerged as we conducted interviews. There are three modes that experimenters might fall into. Self-tracking experimenters seek existing solutions that fit into their particular needs. If not satisfied, they move into building and iterating an experiment. Or they branch out from others’ experiments, tailoring solution for themselves. All three modes of experimentation are under-served by the industry. As a result, we created a platform strategy that serves the three different modes of experimenters, and facilitates the virtuous cycle of searching, building, and branching.

Service in a broader sense
Sharing plays a huge role in the process of experimenting. Experimenters give feedback to each other for improvements, and they get inspired by others presenting their work. Furthermore, the experimenters are motivated through accomplishments and reputations of what they've done. Hence, a stronger tie between the self-tracking community and the experimenters group is valuable. Experimenters better the experience of other self-tracking groups by trying out the novel solutions created by the innovative minds of the experimenters.